Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz
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| Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz | |
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| Incumbent | |
| Assumed office December 2, 2006 |
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| President | Lech Kaczyński |
| Prime Minister | Donald Tusk |
| Vice President | Jacek Wojciechowicz, Jerzy Miller, Andrzej Jakubiak, Włodzimierz Paszyński |
| Preceded by | Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz (acting) |
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| Born | November 4, 1952  Warsaw,  People's Republic of Poland |
| Political party | Civic Platform |
| Spouse | Andrzej Waltz |
| Profession | Economist, lawyer |
| Religion | Roman Catholic |
Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz (IPA: ['xanna grɔn'kʲevʲiʧ 'valʦ], born November 4, 1952 in Płock) is a Polish liberal-conservative politician who has been the President of Warsaw since December 2, 2006. She is the first woman to ever hold this position.
Between 1992 and 2000 she was the Chairman of the National Bank of Poland, the central bank of Poland. Resigned to take a position of the Deputy Chairman of European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, a position she held between 2001 and 2004. She was elected to Sejm on September 25, 2005 getting 137,280 votes in the 19th Warsaw district, running on the Civic Platform list.
In the municipal elections of 2006 Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz was the Platform's nominee for the position of the mayor (president) of Warsaw. On November 12 she gained 34.23% and came in second, just after the candidate of Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, former Prime Minister of Poland Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz. As neither received 50 percent of the vote, a second round was held on 26 November, when Gronkiewicz-Waltz received 53.18% of the votes.
In January 2007, just a few weeks into her term, Gronkiewicz-Waltz was at the center of an affair that could have ultimately cost her the office. A law enacted in 2005 obliged the mayors of Polish municipalities to publicly disclose their own as well as their spouse's financial circumstances. The law requires the successful candidate's disclosure statement to be provided within 30 days after the inauguration, whereas the statement regarding the candidate's spouse is to be submitted within 30 days after the actual election. Gronkiewicz-Waltz submitted her own and her husband's statements on January 2, 2007, exactly 30 days after her inauguration. On January 20, the newspaper Dziennik reported that Mr. Waltz's documents had been two days past the deadline, which in his case had been on December 28, 2006. Based on this, Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński of the governing Law and Justice (PiS) party maintained that Gronkiewicz-Waltz's mandate had expired on December 28, 2006, and announced that the local elections would be repeated. Gronkiewicz-Waltz's party Civic Platform argued that the Prime Minister did not have the authority to make this decision, and that the case would need to be examined in court instead. Polish legal experts maintained that by submitting their statements on the same day, Gronkiewicz-Waltz had observed the spirit, even if not the letter of the law. Also, having two different deadlines for the statements could be considered as an unconstitutional legal trap. In the meantime, Civic Platform announced that it would nominate Gronkiewicz-Waltz again, should the elections need to be repeated. On March 13, 2007, Poland's Constitutional Tribunal ruled against the governing Law and Justice party and struck down the controversial law that threatened her and many other public officials with the loss of their positions solely because they did not file paper work on time.
Regarding gay parades in the capital, Gronkiewicz-Waltz has gone back from her predecessor's opposition to them, approving a gay pride parade in the capital. Though gay parades have been officially allowed in the past, they had always met with strong resistance during the term of Lech Kaczyński as President of Warsaw, particularly from the All-Polish Youth movement. Gronkiewicz-Waltz said the parade would pose no threat to morals and pointed to this month's ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that Kaczyński had acted illegally and discriminatory in banning the gay pride marches. [1]
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz - parliamentary page - includes declarations of interest, voting record, and transcripts of speeches.
- Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz - the official page
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